


Bon-bons of a different color: the Farscape Drabbles

by feldman



Category: Farscape
Genre: Drabble Collection, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 12:13:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 46
Words: 8,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4262898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feldman/pseuds/feldman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As one herds cats, I've gathered most of the Farscape drabbles I've written.  Because the sharp line between collection and clutter is drawn by the act of curating.  So as these are in no particular order, it's kind of like the back of the museum where someone makes a discovery in a box that was carefully packed and dutifully labeled seventy years ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Throw Another Rat on the Barbie

### Throw Another Rat on the Barbie

"Decrease the spin, and increase the chair and room temperature."

Pol adjusts the output of the velocity and thermal servos. She accesses the passive monitoring array and moves more of the subject's biological functions to her main display.

The subject's thermal tolerance is extraordinary, but the possibility of heat delirium cannot be ruled out. Especially now that there is increasing chaos in many of the biologics that had been homeostatic at baseline.

She is working with a sample size of one. There is no room for negligence.

Scorpius glances at the display and nods. His eyes linger, and his hand comes up to her neck slowly. With warning, with respect, as one would touch a battle-trained soldier. His way of praising her is to treat her as more than a medical tech.

"You are beginning to sweat." His fingers find the embedded tab in her collar and he activates the coolant function of her suit. He smiles, "The brain must be kept cool."

A chill runs down the ribs of her corset and diffuses through the panels of the suit, bracing her, clearing the fog. "Thank you, Sir."

"You are most welcome, Pol."

The subject's shivering has abated, and the display indicates that a portion of physical stress has been removed. The readings are still too spiky. The baseline recording indicates that the subject should not have been cold in the first place. "My report is ready, Sir."

"Proceed."

"This is a summary of the first three sessions." She initiates a holographic. "As you can see, the subject exhibits unusual thought patterns, webs of association that obscure precise meaning." She calls up a smaller comparison display. "I believe this explains why the translator microbes are not as efficient."

Pol does not add that after three sessions, she can sometimes grasp meaning from obscurity, like seeing movement at the edge of the visual field.

Scorpius converts the comparison to false color, and a shaft of blue runs through the image. He tilts his head toward Pol.

"That is one of the calibration recordings we made, Sir, of you speaking Scarran."

"Rich in allusion, and hence difficult to translate." Scorpius watches the subject through the holographic display.

"The Aurora Chair is extremely taxing in ways that are difficult to monitor and control. I believe longer periods of recovery time are necessary if the subject is to remain alive long enough for a full course of interrogation "

His eyes meet hers, his chin rises.

"Due to these similarities in thought patterning, I believe the subject would respond well to the probe that we have compiled. I respectfully suggest that we pursue a full neural mapping during recovery periods."

"What's she telling you Scorpy? That I'm only medium rare?"

He is quite rare, and Pol is uncomfortable gambling with such a singular source of knowledge. "Sir, I have taken the liberty of loading probe seed into a sterilized spike."

Scorpius draws in a breath to match the one Pol has caught in her ribcage. "I concur."

He takes the spike, and waits while she stops the platform. Pol follows him with her datapad. The subject is straining to look behind, and the biologics are peaking again. The lengthened recovery periods cannot begin soon enough to please her. She goes through a quick visual assessment of the subject while Scorpius programs the surgical spike.

"What did you give him, Morticia?"

Fear in his voice, and something about death. She approaches slowly, gently tilts and tightens the halo restraint. His chin is against his chest, which opens the space between the base of his skull and the primary vertebral body. She palpates the skull, just posterior to the spinal channel.

"Oh God. Alex...Alex told me about...God, you're going to pith me like a frog..."

The procedure he describes is enigmatic, yet his osteo-anatomy is reassuringly familiar. Pol pulls a stylus from the datapad and inks guide marks onto the back of the neck. She presses down, writing through the sweat.

"There's another dead bishop on the landing, Dad."

The microbes fail her entirely this time. Something makes her respond anyway. She tells herself that she's monitoring his heart rate and the dilation of his pupils. She lays a hand on his wrist and looks into his eyes. "The pain will only last a microt. Then you may rest."

Unaware of Scorpius raising the neural spike behind him, he holds her gaze and enunciates each word. "Frell you, PK Barbie."

Bar-bee, pee-kay bar-bee. Shades of meaning filter through; something pink...or something sharp...or something hot. Interesting. When the neural map is complete, she will explore this concept further.


	2. Cabin Fever

### Cabin Fever

"Woah, check it out, that chick has antennas. Maybe I shouldn't assume it's a chick, I mean, just 'cause it's pink. Maybe it's just from Florida, everybody wears pink down there and Jesus Pete, what is that smell? You guys smell that? Tell me that isn't supposed to be food, 'cause food cubes are growing on me, those braunschweiger ones we got last week are kinda good, but whatever that is is ripe--"

Aeryn wheels around. "Why did you come down, again?"

"Cabin fever."

"If you're ill you should be back aboard Moya."

"No, no, it's an expression. Back before TV people would be cooped up in the house, sometimes snowed in, with nothing to do all winter long--"

"Snowed in?" D'Argo concludes his transaction and joins the huddle. "I thought your planet was hot and swampy."

"Well, parts of it are, in other places there's snow in the winter--you see, Earth is tilted a little," Crichton diagrams with his hands as he speaks, and they both stare at him as if they're waiting for the translator microbes to catch up. "As it goes around the sun, the top half and then the bottom half get more light--"

"So let me get this straight," Aeryn's mock fascination cracks into a crooked smile, and D'Argo snickers. "Your planet is lopsided," she braces D'Argo as he collapses onto her shoulder with a howl of laughter, "and your species can become ill from lack of entertainment."

D'Argo wheezes, "Bottom half!" and Aeryn buries her face in his chest, overcome.


	3. Move at Random

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for Thassalia

### Move at Random

Order out of Chaos...he hears it in the voice of Egg Shen from "Big Trouble in Little China". He squints one eye closed and watches her snag the pieces, watches her sort them into squads of white and black and arrange them on the board again.

When he made the board he chose good components for white and blown ones for black. He's learned since that there're no good fuses on his board, just that some fuses blow out white and some black. He's also learned that Aeryn has a head for chess as well as talking him down.


	4. Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues

### Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues

The other letters had also been marked with her blood, chemical proof of identity and non-cleansed status. Her pleas to see Nerri were carefully phrased, to demonstrate her discretion. Rygel couldn't help her compose this last note, hidden under the lapel of his robe and folded so that the still sticky blood won't stain his clothes.

She'll be beaten for tearing her detention uniform, and Rygel hopes they don't realize that some of the fabric is missing until he's at a safe distance. Nerri will never risk seeing her now, but Rygel is confident that he can negotiate his assistance.


	5. Moon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For hossgal

### Moon

"It's okay to be scared son, the important thing is that you don't let it stop you. Tell you what."

He remembers being small enough that leaning back against his Dad, sighting along the man's strong arm out to the moon in the sky, felt safe as being home, being tucked in at night.

"All you have to do is come out on the porch here and look up, that's where I'll be. Okay?"

He'd nodded, but there was enough fear left to make him burrow back into the man's embrace, grinding his dirty sneaker soles into the concrete step.

"I'll wave to you when I get there. Will you wave back to me, son?"

He shrugs out of the hug, stands eye to eye with the man sitting on the steps above him. He's not a baby like his little sister. "You can't wave all the time."

"Smart kid." The smile is better than the hug anyway. "I guess I'll have to figure out something else."

~*~

He's careful with the photograph, brittle with age and cold. Don't snap it, don't lose it. On his way back to the pod, he surveys the mess of tracks he's paced all over the famous footprints.

He doesn't see his father waving from the porch.


	6. Home

### Home

He'd wanted to be more than a slave--but that isn't true, is it?

The opportunity he'd taken was to inflict pain for once instead of absorbing it, still thinking like a slave, still grabbing whatever he could; food, comfort, revenge.

Action unworthy of a warrior, of being his father's son--which isn't too frelling surprising because when did he ever agree to be either one? Still.

How can it hurt more to give pain than receive it?

He stands straighter, pulling against the burn on his chest. He doesn't scratch, because the itch distracts him from the ache underneath.


	7. Galactose

### Galactose

His head and heart pound for lack of ready oxygen, but he won't go back to the pod. Aeryn takes the cold thin atmosphere in stride and he follows her example.

He sets his fingertips lightly on her jacket hem while she haggles, so she can't ditch him while he's staring at the sky.

It's like cream stirred into coffee, milky bright with starlight unchecked by the thin atmosphere. A galaxy that's the unabridged Les Miserables version of the Cliffs Notes Milky Way avalanches slowly into the horizon as the little commerce planetoid spins.

This is his second alien world.


	8. This Little Light of Mine

### This Little Light of Mine

Long ago, the itch sunk through his skin, into his bone and brain. It ground through flesh like the mines grind through Baniks.

Each night when his people sleep, he bites his fingernails sharp and exposes a fresh layer of himself to the night sky. He wants the wound to kill him. His remaining eye still sees too much pain.

Tonight there is no itch, no ragged flesh to soothe by paring away.

Cool light pours from the shelters. From the doorway, the weary and the dying look like windows flooding in light from the other side.

They are beautiful.


	9. I'm Fine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Kazbaby

### I'm Fine

"I'm not gonna lose my mind. It's all I've got left."

He knew it for a lie when he said it, knew he was screwed six ways from Sunday, and truth be told, that's what had brought the smile to his face. There's no rule that says you can't lose everything. There are no rules, period.

The fullness of time and horror makes him admit that, even if Aeryn had believed him, the bald-faced reassurance hadn't ever been a lie. The snicker and smile had been a prayer, like the ritual of the chessboard, a grasping hoodoo to reinforce control.


	10. A Hard Droog is Good to Find

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Onion Headline Challenge: "Fuck Buddy Becomes Fuck-Fiance"  
> Chiana Challenge  
> First Lines Challenge: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

### A Hard Droog Is Good To Find

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

She'd been buzzing with the sheer disbelief and joy of being alive, but now the buzz is turning sour and it's bringing back all the fear she'd shoved aside for days beforehand.

"'Cause I'm sick of your looming!" She grabs him, slams him against a bulkhead, and climbs up his body until they're face to face. "So--what's it gonna be, D'Argo? What the frell do you want from me?"

"I want you."

"S'at so?"

"Yes. I want to taste you, and be inside you, and curl myself around you."

"Huh. Well I'm okay with that if you are."

"Not just that. I want to love you, and care for you, and walk beside you for as long as you'll have me."

"So, uh..."

"You were cruel to hurt me, but I was the fool who forced you to it. Which is why I'm asking now, before we do anything. Do you want these things from me?"

"Do I just want the sex or do I want more?"

"Yes."

"Right now..." She forces herself to stop staring at his gorgeous mouth. "Right now we should frell. We'll figure the 'more' part out later."


	11. Fairies Wear Boots

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Kixxa

### Fairies Wear Boots

She has pixie ears, complex waveforms of cartilage and velvet flesh that he wants to cup under his hands and explore with the tip of his tongue like a kid riding curves in a skatepark.

She's vicious and elvin, sleek hair pulled back so severely it takes the ends of her eyebrows with it. Her roughneck stare and trippy tongue hit his bloodstream like adrenaline.

She has no idea how the bare strip of skin above her gunbelt devastates him, how much he wants to span her waist with his grip, thumbs nestled in the dimples just above her tailbone.


	12. Comet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Comet, it makes your mouth turn green! Comet, it tastes like Listerine!"

### Comet

Aeryn marches directly to the detritus chute before she speaks. "D'Argo said you had something for nausea."

Noranti nods, already compiling the list of parameters: early stage pregnancy, previous parapheral nerve damage, willing to shoot over unpleasant side-effects. The formula she's compiled for the rest of the crew won't be suitable. "Simple nausea or are you also vomiting?"

At the word Aeryn pales, braces against the wall and ejects a violent gush. She pants and wipes at her mouth, all white knuckles and cold skin.

Noranti licks her lips, compounding ingredients in her mind. "Come back in a quarter arn."


	13. HarveyRuth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Katya (Veritykindle)

### HarveyRuth

He refrains from smashing the headstone. The only useful anger is the one he's failing to kindle in John.

The flowers in his hand are rapini, a beautiful bitter green that tastes best when exposed to intense heat and agitation--stir fried--bringing out the sweetness to compliment the bite. Harvey knows that pizza and beer are the easy answers, a shorthand notation representing the complex equation of everything lost. He prefers teasing out the subtle complexities beneath, they comprise the breadth and depth of the cozy universe he'd been exiled to.

There is another exile buried in another stubborn brain. Harvey wishes him well.


	14. Dig Your Grave

### Dig Your Grave

"Scorpius."

He shakes the soil from his head and notes the soft sibilance of his name, as well as the distinct lack of 'sir'. Nothing like the hard hiss of the girl who buried him. Scorpius wonders if Grayza's applications of musk have blunted Braca's mind along with his energy signature, compromised the precision of one of his best tools.

A firm grip wrenches him free of the dirt, however, pleasing strength and efficiency. Perhaps the man's strange affect is due simply to the shock of a successful disinterment. Braca hands him a fully charged weapon and briskly refills the hole, his loyalty more precious than deference.


	15. Buckshot

### Buckshot

I'm the first one out of the holster these days.

I was a Commander like Hawkeye Pierce was a Captain. The rank was a side effect, a hoop I jumped through to get on the shuttle. I trained with a gun, but I never thought I'd kill. I thought of myself as a scientist.

Push came to shove and I took to it like Buck in "Call of the Wild". Even named my damned pulse pistol for dad's best bird dog, loyal and fearless Wynona. The Uncharted Territories, red in tooth and claw. Red for Sebaceans, blue for Nebari, Luxans are black until they turn clear.

How many people have I killed, now that I've become good at it? Now that I've added nuns and children to the list? "Aeryn."

"Yes?"

"What do you know about military tactics?"

For a while, I think she won't answer me.

"Nothing that would make you feel any better."


	16. First Contact

### First Contact

The little ship is still warm from the Parent it came out of, but unlike him, it is inert. It fits into his bay like a tool into a socket. Reassuring. The pilot steps out of the little ship. Internal weapons prime, and the pilot is watched from every direction. The pilot is not like a tool, even though it also fits inside him. It is like a tiny Parent.

The pilot is exchanging some of the oxygen in the atmosphere for a mix of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and oddly familiar trace gases. The pilot uses the outflow to carry modulated vibrations, and the stimulus triggers the first of a series of imprinting programs.

This first program analyzes the vibration sample, then executes a series of commands. Internal weapons power down, natal language functions are brought online, and the ship begins to understand.

The pilot is speaking a Sebacean military dialect, and is an ally. The being is not a tiny Parent, it is his commanding officer. The commanding officer's speech is re-routed to the primary biological interface, and the ship begins to learn.

The first thing the ship learns is that the command structure is no longer valid.


	17. Functionary/Revolutionary

### Functionary/Revolutionary

Functionary.

As a child I tested at the metropolis. The first night there, from my window, I witnessed a Provincial Administrator rip apart her secretary just outside gateway to the Port Authority Complex.

The secretary's mistake was a negligible one, but had embarrassed the Administrator in public. Perhaps the Scarran had also been waiting for an excuse to replace a mediocre functionary or to instill more respect in the remaining members of her staff.

Even after the pieces stilled into death, they remained there for days. Whatever future training was assigned to me, I had already learned the most important lessons.

Revolutionary.

She will not be exactly like me. If that were so, she would not be capable of doing the things she must. She will be like me, but more dangerous and more courageous.

She will burn like fire and return to them, with interest, the viciousness they have deposited in my care since I was small. I relax and let the intelligent flesh surround me, read my genetic sequences and thought patterns.

Before she goes, I will twist her hair up in coils for her and kiss her. I smile her ferocious smile and imagine them falling at my feet.


	18. Kinky Imagery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Kernezelda: Crais, in cop blues, terrier rampant.

### Kinky Imagery

Crais came after him with a chain once, like a biker, like a rabid dog, and John had scuttled and shouted and tried to reason with him. Tried to break through rage and grief with words because what he knows now, he didn't know then. Namely, rage and grief. Listen, man, we've all got stories...

Glady's next door loved that damned dog. It mellowed her. The edge on her voice honed by years of screeching at the neighbor kids melted when she crooned at her Poopsie. Crais looks good with the dog.

Now...what the hell's a Left-handed Latvian Rodeo Torture?


	19. Scattered

### Scattered

The granary was hollow.

The flood waters were thick with the soil washing away.

"And your father, is he recovering from his illness?" The older woman pours chasj. The younger wipes her face with her sleeve.

"He was always so strong. It's frightening to see him helpless, unwilling to even try. He lives in the past and he waits for death."

His sons were solid, dark as rich earth and unaware of the long season of starvation that had begun. The recruiter was leaving at daybreak.

"He still cannot speak properly." He hears his wife in the younger woman's tears. "And he often calls me by my mother's name."

Bracelets rattle as the matron motions a ward with her hand. "I am sure he doesn't mean to name the dead."

He let the wind pull his sons from him, seeds for another field. The universe granted them a daughter in their place, with the face of the woman who's heart he broke when he told her that her sons would be soldiers.

"I never realized how old my father was already, when I was born."


	20. Bad Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during "Thanks for Sharing": I wrote this drabble and then forgot about it for months, not realizing until after the fact how much it preceded Skull Candy.

### Bad Blood

Despite traveling through the tube that connects them like Chang and Eng, the heat is undeniable, intimate and oppressive. As necessary as the fastidious stitches holding his femoral vein together.

"Femoral vein" translates. So does "match" in the sense of equivalent, if not in the sense of portable fire. Damn, how cold had he gotten that his normal blood heat burns so hot?

He watches his donor pump his fist as the Red Cross taught him, he catches himself wanting to mirror it. He wonders how much hate is saturated into the blood along with the oxygen, how much love?


	21. Angel Dressed in Black

### Angel Dressed in Black

"Don't be useless!" she'd said, as if he had any choice at this point, as if any of it mattered.

None of it. All of it a waste of time and effort, breaking his back to be paid in pain, his enemy roaming the heart of the ship and isn't he just the other half of a corpse that's taking forever to stop moving?

His body aches from the existential spider-bite, and he curls like a bug on the floor. She's off in the shuttle but she won't make it back, they'll die and their shells will continue drifting apart.


	22. Apocrypha

### Apocrypha

She deciphers the sentences like taking apart a steering fin, tracing how the action words pull the object words, how this dynamic is fine-tuned by the adjuster words.

She spends arns each night recalling every lesson until the memories are instinctive and the shape of his thoughts are inscribed on her pounding skull, until the words come fast enough for her to track the trajectory of the thoughts that pilot them.

Her lips move in cadence, her fingers caress the grooves on the page.

She studies, and tests her knowledge of a dead language against the living man. Keeps failing.


	23. Rock & a Hard Place

### Rock & a Hard Place

Early in her training she learned that there are a million ways to die, but only a few kinds of dead soldier. Aeryn is one specific kind. She's a soldier who ignored the unknown until it proved itself dangerous.

She stands with her thumb hooked in her belt and her elbow braced against the doorway, looking through the gate at the Crichtons. They sit across from each other, hands folded under their noses. They've blinked maybe twice in the time she's been watching.

In the beginning she dismissed him as just another civilian with a spanner, scrawling formulas on the floor and babbling to himself. By the time she realized her mistake, he had already flown in under her sensor threshold. He sabotaged years of training, and killed the soldier she'd been made to be, simply by questioning every assumption she'd been raised with.

He's reconfigured her more drastically than he has that moronically happy-looking module.

Two of them could erase her entirely.

"Well I'm not going to wet my knees like some raw conscript." She squares her shoulders and chin, pulls in her stomach to brace her spine.

Chiana laces her fingers through the gate and joins Aeryn in watching the Crichtons. "Wet your knees?"

"To urinate in fright, or to curl up and sob like a child."

Chiana huffs. "Leave it to Peacekeepers to confuse a perfectly normal reaction with incontinence. Look on the dayside. I'm sure there might be some advantage to having a spare. You could be snug as a pouchling between..." Her voice peters out as she takes in the cold hollow stare reverberating in the space between the Crichtons.

"I doubt he would even notice me." Aeryn hears herself using the singular instead of the plural. "I wonder what they're thinking."

She purposefully leaves it open for Chiana, as she used to do with Zhaan. She wants to hear something cheerful, something derogatory and sweet like 'Only the Goddess knows. Even she might not understand, but she knows.'

Chiana's voice is small and dry. "He's wondering whether it'd be homicide or suicide."


	24. The Preferred Solution

### The Preferred Solution

She teases him with her knife as she suckles him with her mouth, and he walks a high-wire of lust over a valley of fear and despair.

She decides that the tip of her knife has illustrated the wisdom of honest compliance, so she interrogates him while she fucks him leisurely from above. The filmy material of her shift rasps against the leathers she hasn't bothered to remove.

He answers, and his words are just another fluid she's milking from him, flowing out on a wave of his blood, sweat and semen. Afterward, her cruel tenderness extracts his exhausted tears.


	25. Life Feeds on Life

### Life Feeds on Life

He strokes her cheek, soft and warm as only life can be. The meat part of his head aches from her fist; nothing compared to the anger in his heart.

To think that he felt such joy when he came to and followed her blissful stare. When he saw Aeryn Sun swaying on her own feet like a newborn animal and realized that they'd somehow midwived her back into the world.

To think he didn't notice how the steady pulse beat of Zhaan's spirit against his had turned thready and sore.

To think that she used him to kill herself.


	26. Worst Day Since Yesterday

### Worst Day Since Yesterday

She storms to her quarters and grabs a bag, hot blue with fury at herself, but she doesn't pack her things, doesn't want to carry such useless stuff, bait for thieves--doesn't really want to leave even though the guilt hurts worse than contagion.

The authorities wasted cycles trying to inoculate her with shame to go along with their disease, but a Luxan just did it with the break in his voice as he ordered her away, fevered her skin with shame with the hurt in his voice alone.

If she stays or goes, there's no cure. So she stays.


	27. Rite of Spring

### Rite of Spring

For the hundredth time, Stark darts out and presses his face to the dirt like the Pope on a tarmac. For the first time, he likes what he tastes. "Here! Yes! Here, right now!"

She is unconscious and curled up like a seed when they plant her in the loam, black and spongy as devil's food cake. They bury her down past her eyebrows.

Within an arn, her skull unfurls into a cluster of leaves. Stark rocks on his knees, stroking her outer leaves and crying into his sleeves. He'll make sure none of them peeks into her unguarded head.


	28. Conjure

### Conjure

She's drunk enough that she can finally smell him, memory made material through the catalyst of nectar and raw need. She closes her eyes. Her head drifts down and to her right, and the oppressive warmth of the smog becomes the heat of his shoulder against her chin, beneath her nose.

She sits very still, feeling the slight sway to her body from her heart thudding in her chest. She conjures him, breathes the scent of his skin deep into her, feels the silky drag against her lips. Slowly, she imagines his head turning to meet hers...


	29. Ties

### Ties

"Quick! You--hold me down. You--cut me here."

"I can't--"

"Just under the skin, here, he'll bleed but serves him right for keeping it so long."

"A *disc*, for frell's sake?"

"They didn't want her, just me. But you saw the notice. I won't lead them to her. Won't let them trace me from her. Cut. Me. Open."

"Frell!"

"Hurry, he's stronger than he looks."

"Frell, what a bloody mess!"

"Good, you see, it's right there."

"Oh...it's pulsing."

"That's her heartbeat."

"...crsht..."

"What?"

"...crush it..."

"Got it?"

"Still flashing."

"Now it's stopped."

"Tough piece of dren."

"...baby sister..."


	30. Fuck & Run

### Fuck & Run

Now that it's over he thinks of all the things he should have thought of before.

What if she has AIDS? What kind of girl paints her skin grey, even under her clothes? What if Kim finds out? What if he just got this girl pregnant?

Karen. Karen Shaw. He gouges the name into his brain and returns her nervous smile. She wasn't like that in the truck. She'd been soothing calm, the only thing that kept his heart from skidding out of his chest as she touched him. She'd kissed him like she knew him, like she liked him, even though they were strangers and for all she knows he fucks girls in crack houses every day.

He stifles the giggle before it breaks loose, and smiles when she hands him the glass, trying to be polite when all he wants is to run.


	31. Timing

### Timing

"This is your playground."

He pauses with their son upraised, the silence broken only by a deliberative grunt from the baby. John blinks, then presses his lips together. There's a squishing noise and stern grumbles from little D'Argo, as his feet lash out and his fists wave heroically.

John seems reluctant to lower the child, to surrender the sanctity of the moment. Aeryn waits patiently, aware that the moment is as ruined as the cloth swaddling the child's eema. With a last explosive vent the boy finishes, and John tucks him carefully against his chest with a sigh.

Aeryn can no longer restrain herself. "He's got your sense of timing."


	32. Scars and Missing Parts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For pdxscaper (IntheMoment)

### Scars and Missing Parts

There is no utility in hindsight save for lessons learned. There is no use for lessons learned when there is no alternate path to follow. This is who they are, constantly positioning, fighting for leverage, exploiting weaknesses, struggling against the inevitable.

His blood is a smoky warm counterpoint to the silver fear scent, the scents evaporating from his hot skin and riding the air currents straight into Scorpius' nose. The stimulus is strong enough to elicit a breath of visceral pleasure from the enfeebled Scarran regions of his cooled brain, but not enough to override his own apprehension.

Grayza will not give them any more time. They must not fail.


	33. Umbilical

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during 'Nerve'

### Umbilical

She spurs a DRD onto the bed, waits for it to angle the viewer stalk down and focus on the female's hand, and she remembers being piloted out of the gravity well...

speed, escape...freedom...

A gift, from this tiny hand no different from the hands that collared her. They can do so much damage, she forgets how small they are.

The DRD extends a sensor arm to the skin and relays the information to her...

soft and still and bitter as death  
...and not salty sweet, pulling her toward the stars

Let her bleed into me...let me flow into her.


	34. Support Staff

### Support Staff

Her enjoyment of her murder still shocks him.

She is weightless in his arms, her kisses carnivorous and her breathing ragged. "The crew believes I'm dead. His loyalty is proven."

Braca presses back against the wall, kicking away the empty casualty bag. "His plan worked."

They can only talk about Scorpius, so they don't talk at all. Bruises garland her neck, and her freckles sheen with arousal. She frees his cock, kneels against the wall, takes him in. Her gravity shifts as she fucks him. He swoons with lust and vertigo.

The airlock cycles through the sequence for body disposal.


	35. Porcelain Skin

### Porcelain Skin

He knew from earth that it would be difficult, that his body had become accustomed

_addicted_

to the hit.

If Granny hadn't slipped an extra in her pocket, he would have been this bad, or worse, in front of his family. In front of his dad, his baby sister.

Instead it's Aeryn who watches him, arms crossed and forehead crumpled, mouth emotionless as she holds up the doorway. He curls away from the waste funnel, arms shaking as he braces against the warm floor.

"Know what the worst part is?" Besides Aeryn watching him detox with that careful expression, calculating the differentials between empathy and hurt.

Her voice isn't unsympathetic, even though she hasn't touched him since the cold turkey set in with a vengeance. "That you did this to yourself?"

He doesn't shake his head, doesn't goad the vertigo, just squeezes his eyes shut and hunches back on his knees, spine collapsed around the vibrating clench of his belly. "The floor is warm. Sick as a dog and not a cold tile in the place."

"Cold floors." She pushes off from the doorway and takes a step closer.

"You rest your forehead on the cold floor. Helps."

"Cold." He watches her arms unfold, her hands careful as she unholsters her weapon and turns it as if to pistol whip him in slow mo. "Against the forehead?"

He risks a single nod, and then the flat of the grip is cool against his head, the chill of the chakkan oil inside bleeding off some of the sick heat of his brain. Eyes closed, his hands involuntarily cup the grip and shift her cool fingers against his skin. Her other hand strokes through his damp hair, tentative, and he swallows against the rising tremor.


	36. Sprouts

### Sprouts

"You remember a few months ago, when we went into the root cellar and waited for the big storm to pass?"

"Yes." He's a big boy so he doesn't cry. But he woke up at the neighbor's house and Auntie Tekli wouldn't let him go home until Momma came for him.

"We just had a little storm at our house is all. Everything is fine now."

He remembers the seeds that Daddy helped him plant, sprouts velvet green like Momma's special dress. "What about my plantses by the door? Daddy said storms help little things grow."

Momma hugs him tight.


	37. Penance

### Penance

"Discipline is the self striving toward an ideal."

When she agreed to this penance, she thought it'd be better than giving Aeryn the satisfaction of having her laundry done. Go to Zhaan's room after the first meal, sit still, and listen until she is dismissed. Easy as breathing.

"Discipline is not achieved by reaching a goal, but by reaching for a goal."

It would've been easy, but Zhaan has a harsh definition of sitting still and she enforces it with little flicks of her fingers. No moving, no scratching, no sleeping--Chiana even has to breath a certain way. At first she thought they were excuses to apply the flicks, but when she does sit still and breath deeply, Zhaan doesn't touch her.

"One becomes a disciple to something greater than one's self: this is discipline."

She's heard all this before and it's why she left home in the first place. She knows where it leads: the individual serves society, and is grateful for whatever brutal improvements society deems necessary to inflict.

"Discipline is the daily building of--"

"This is pointless." She untangles her legs, stands. "I've sat here for an arn already and all I've gained is a sore eema."

Zhaan blinks and smiles up at her. "With remarkably little fidgeting today. I'm pleasantly surprised."

The lack of irony in her voice intrigues Chiana. "You act like I actually accomplish something here besides boredom."

"You're learning discipline."

Chiana laughs. "No offense Zhaan, but the Nebari are way ahead of this discipline-wise, and they couldn't improve me either."

She takes Chiana's wrist. "What you endured then, child, was punishment." She pulls her down onto the bed beside her. "Discipline cannot be imposed from the outside, it must flow from inner conviction."

Chiana shifts her hips against the soft bedding. "Well it's not my inner conviction to sit on the floor until my ears ring and my eema is numb."

"I only offer you the task. Each day that you bend yourself to the task, you practice discipline."

"And this will somehow make me a better person."

"I cannot change you. If I could, I'd make you less cynical..." Zhaan shakes her head, "but then you wouldn't be who you are. What I can do is help you discover your better self."

Chiana tastes the idea for a moment. "Discover her...like she's already somewhere and I need to find her?"

Zhaan lays her hands long Chiana's cheeks and smiles like she's found something she was looking for. "Yes."


	38. Pistola

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For fbf

### Pistola

He probably thinks of it as armor, and he's right, most eyes slide right off that leather shell and are glad that he keeps walking. Away.

Chiana prefers when he walks toward. She likes the way the black darkens him and gives his masculinity a Nebari flavor, likes how the dull shine delineates his shape, the odd turn-out of his slightly bowed legs, his individual variations on the hollows and bulges that have always caught her eye since she ripened out of childhood.

He probably thinks the coat protects him, and maybe it does. But she knows the heart underneath those PK straps, has run her fingers through primal fur covering muscles that could rip her in half, heard him subvocalize her name and beat at his heart in frustration.

She knows where he came from, and she isn't fooled.


	39. Alligator Smile

### Alligator Smile

He spits, "May I speak?" He hears the sarcasm in his own voice, fresh hot and startling.

His humor had always been cold and dry, an elegant counterpoint to his violence. His verbal attacks were threats that he could deliver on, and his jokes were solely for his own amusement.

"For ten cycles I've served you as a spy, why would I betray you now?"

It had never occurred to him to combine the two, to attack an opponent with jokes, to make fun of, to poke and prod with words that meant nothing.

To snark.

He'd been eager to understand Crichton better, predict him more accurately...it had been cycles since he'd sampled the human's psyche, and it was imperative that he take every rare advantage offered to him. Crichton's trust in Sikozu made it effortless. He reprogrammed the neural clone, copied it for backup and added a real-time transmission system.

Always save Crichton.

The clone was a body of knowledge to be replicated and preserved, yes, but Scorpius found it was a body with its own heat and blood, its own perspective. His own voice, his own name.

"Thank you, John."

That first night he focused on controlling and interpreting the direct feed from Crichton, then he sifted for the wormhole equations. Sated, his thoughts turned to the neural clone itself.

He pondered how this tool, built from traits strategically chosen for the neurochip, could devolve into a loyal jester. Harvey played the docile informant, but Scorpius was careful of anyone who changed loyalties even once, much less twice. He didn't want to integrate the whole of Harvey back into himself.

He spent his time in his cell in meditation, once so deep that it took Sikozu an arn to rouse him. He wanted to pull Harvey apart for study, to understand, to absorb what was useful and neutralize what was harmful. In time, the neural hybrid was vivisected, cataloged and set aside.

The sarcasm was the first clue that he'd been less than successful.

~*~

Sikozu's energy signature flicks upwards, and she stops mid-sentence. "What did you just do?"

He brings his full attention to her. "Are you well, Sikozu? Your coloring has changed."

"Did you just...roll...your eye?"

Indeed he had. He'd rolled both of them. "I apologize. I am still tired from my experience with the mollusks. But I am quite interested in your observations. Please, go on."

Her pupils contract and her signature burns down to a normal color. "So that roll of your eyes...did you learn that from Crichton?"

He smiles on the outside. Harvey had retained some of his foundation traits, he was insidious and not easily submerged. He was a strange shadow behind Scorpius, a filter over his vision. Scorpius was determined to control the changes, he would not be undermined by a Crichtonized caricature of himself.

In a flicker of daydream, he sees his hands cradle Sikozu's head, black thumbs caressing the sheen on her cheeks. Her eyes are closed, her skull fractured, and her skin salty sweet.

A hand on his shoulder pushes him down onto the cot. Sikozu, amused.

"Rest, Scorpius." She opens the door, and calls to him over her shoulder, "I've lowered the temperature in your cell. You should feel the difference soon."

He props himself on his elbows. "Thank you for your assistance, Sikozu." The door closes, and he murmurs, "Unfortunately, I feel the difference already."


	40. Numb

### Numb

You'll wrap your arms around him, hold him tighter than the chains ever held you. You won't notice the ring digging into his cheek until the pressure on your collarbone aches and he shrugs himself out of your embrace.

The amputations won't shock you, the damage mute testament of a family ripped apart. Your sorrow will feed your determination to make it right. You'll reach out to soothe the scars.

You will hear him tell you that he had held the blade, severed his own exquisitely sensitive flesh, and that will shock you every time you look into his eyes.


	41. PK Kama Sutra

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Sorlk Lewis

### PK Kama Sutra

"I can release all the tension I want."

Routine maintenance, no assistance needed. The insistent hydraulics pressing against her arse belie the calm of his voice and the efficacy of self-reliance. For either of them.

"I don't need your charity."

Charity, compassion, hunger, how can something as basic and mindless as touch be so entangled? The solution is so simple, so close at hand, her hands aching to slide under his leather and bask in the feel of all the textures hidden underneath.

"And I don't need your emotions."

Just taste of his sweat and his kiss. Just his rhythm driving into her and the juices coming off of them in steam.

"But we can have sex if you want."


	42. Boom Boom Mancini

### Boom Boom Mancini

It's the first time John's seen an honest expression on that gaunt grey face. He'd savor the look, far sweeter than any bootlicking show, but there's no time.

He knows how that look feels; he's sure he wore it when Scorpy tapped a specimen cup full of malignant brain against the surgical restraints on Hoth. Odd that it took a shield around Audrey II to put that look on Scorpy's face.

John's glad to find that even with a working verbal center, he still sputters and flails.

Mentor me all you want, Grasshopper--now it's your turn.

Learn to lose.


	43. Woolgathering

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during 'Crichton Kicks': the time for woolgathering has passed.

### Woolgathering

Small fingers comb through his beard.

No curious child with dusky hair and dark blue eyes, no dream to pass the time while the still dripped out another batch of nepenthe. The fingers are real, the large cat eyes blink with consideration before Rygel clicks his tongue and speaks.

"Crichton, hair is for decoration, not concealment."

John tickles the sparse whiskers in the Dominar's chin. "You're jealous."

"No, I'm simply curious." Rygel steers around to John's other side and hovers closer. "Did you grow that thing to keep you company, like on Acquara?"

"I didn't have a razor. The only blade I could find was serrated, and I was saving that for my wrists. You wouldn't happen to have anything I could shave with? I'm sobering up and this thing itches like a sombitch."

"Heh. Might as well go to your grave well-groomed." Rygel leans over the side of his chair and releases a small drawer. He sorts through brow combs, pots of hair stiffener and skin gloss, implements as menacing and unwieldy as an eyelash curler. He gathers a few items in his lap and closes the drawer. He hands a piece to John.

The mulberry colored handle is warm like amber and chased with the mellow sheen of platinum. John opens it and tests the stout blade with the pad of his thumb. The edge feels silky and indistinct, but sharp as panic. "Straight razor. This is going to be a challenge."

"A Dominar is always prepared for treachery." He draws himself up and delivers the next bit with a smile. "All of my personal grooming tools can double as weapons."

"Frog. James Frog." John contemplates the razor. "Back on Moya I had a little PK tool. Thing was like a Ron Popeil wet dream come true; it shaved, it had a pop out scissors, it had six different length settings to buzz hair. Had some bad hair days getting used to it, but--"

"That Luxan owes me!" Rygel barks, nearly costing John a thumb.

He takes a cleansing breath and tucks the blade back into its holder. "What are you talking about?"

Rygel unscrews the lid off a blue pot the size of a teacup. "D'Argo thought you were using a pulse pistol to cut your hair." He sniffs the contents and blinks regally. "I maintained that the fact you still had a head belied that theory."

"Nice."

"Clip down that nasty patch of negnik fur beforehand, or you'll dull my blade." Rygel hands him a gold pair of scissors that come to a dagger point.

John can only fit the tips of his fingers into the small scissors. "When I get my hands on that little PK pocket barber I'm going to put it in my pocket and never leave it anywhere."

"A better resolution would be, in future, to do all of your pouting inside the ship."


	44. Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man

### Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man

"Goodbye then, John." He tastes tobacco smoke when he pulls in a deep breath. They're only reconstructions; the hard wood seat of the chair, the starchy white shirt clinging to his back on a sheen of human sweat, the oil and dust scraping underneath his stiff dress shoe.

The even breathing of the man behind him.

"I will miss you."

And yet everything is hyper-real and precious. He is naked underneath the cotton and wool, the barrier of the coolant suit long gone and irretrievable.

When John rips these things away, he will have nothing left but vulnerability.

"Without hesitation."


	45. Thaw

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Kernezelda: What if John had been picked up by Aeryn instead of Elack?

### Thaw

He's cold to the touch and that makes her angry.

It's the second time she's hauled him out of freefall in space, a speck among debris, but this time there is no burning moon to offer even the semblance of heat, only a newly dead Leviathan that still retains some warmth.

She had ignored the flash at the edge of her sensor range for arns before turning back. If he'd gone back home, that would be the end. It would be clean. It would be irretrievable. In the end she had to know.

It's the second time she's wrestled his dead weight out of his module, but this time his smell is sweet and cold, not iron sharp with bile and blood. His spark flutters and dies as she pulls supplies from her Prowler, cold blood returning to his heart and shocking it still.

She had decided not to board Moya, choosing to pause just inside transmission range only long enough to ask. All she picked up was a small reflective shadow bouncing back an echo of her signal.

It's the second time she's laced her fingers into a ram and battered at his heart, tipped back his head to breathe into his mouth in a parody of a kiss, but this time her heart stops when his begins to pulse.

She and her ship are the best sources of heat to keep him alive, the only things that aren't cooling down to absolute zero. She pulls him into the cockpit and wraps a thermal tarp around them both, forcing herself to hold onto the bitter flesh of his body until he's warm enough to shiver.


	46. The Highs Are Too High, and The LoMo's Way Too Low

### The Highs Are Too High, and The LoMo's Way Too Low

Jool stands rooted in the corridor, clutching the pink scar on her arm and crying. No sound, no tears, just screaming red hair and shaking.

Chiana is drained to the point of aching, but she can't leave her there. "Hey."

Jool sucks in a ragged breath and hides her face in her hands.

She still doesn't cry, just gasps and drips tears onto the bedroom floor as Chiana removes stiff leather and wraps her in bare skin and cool slippery sheets, whispers outrageous stories into her ear until she smirks through the tears, until they both fall into dreamless sleep.


End file.
